Rudolf Arnheim; Studied Art-Perception Links

With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Die Weltbuehne became a major target of the fascists. Dr. Arnheim said he was particularly fearful because he had satirized Hitler in an essay for the Berlin newspaper Berliner Tagesblatt.

Dr. Arnheim went to Rome, where he spent five years as associate editor of a League of Nations cultural publication. He enhanced his reputation by writing books about film and radio as art forms.

While in Italy, he reportedly stayed with Vittorio Mussolini, the eldest son of dictator Benito Mussolini and a cinephile who openly admired Jewish cultural figures. Dr. Arnheim was forced to leave in 1938 when Benito Mussolini instituted race laws targeting Jews.

After a brief stopover in London, Dr. Arnheim immigrated to New York and won a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the influence of radio soap opera on listeners. He became a naturalized citizen in 1946.

His first major U.S. book was "Art and Visual Perception," which was translated into 14 languages over the years.

In later studies, he explored topics as varied as children's visual perception abilities, conceptual art ("useful exercises of the imagination") and Pablo Picasso's disturbing Spanish Civil War painting "Guernica," which Dr. Arnheim said was an illustration of existential horrors because the aggressors were not visible. The Picasso mural, he wrote in 1962, "depicts the effects of a brutality that strikes from nowhere."

He was a former president of the American Society for Aesthetics and the American Psychological Association as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His marriage to Annette Siecke Arnheim ended in divorce. A daughter from that marriage, Anna, died at 6 of Hodgkin's disease.

His second wife, Mary Frame Arnheim, whom he married in 1953, died in 1999.

Survivors include a stepdaughter whom he adopted, Margaret Nettinga of Heemstede, the Netherlands; two grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.